NEW MILFORD—The Merryall Center will present the Connecticut premiere of “Dedication,” a one-person play written and performed by pianist Roger Peltzman, on Saturday, Sept. 21, at 7:30 p.m.
“Lots of survivors can’t talk about the Holocaust,” says Peltzman in his play. “My mother wasn’t one of them. She had no problem telling it like it was.”
In 1942, Roger’s grandparents, uncle and mother went into hiding in Nazi-occupied Brussels. Deep down his mother knew it was just a matter of time before the family was discovered.
Two years later, they were discovered and sent to Auschwitz. Peltzman’s mother escaped out of the attic and over the roof, never to see her parents and brother again.
Drawn into the story of people he never knew, Peltzman develops a “relationship” with his uncle, Norbert Stern, a brilliant pianist who was murdered in Auschwitz at age 21.
Learning that Holocaust trauma can be inherited, Peltzman recounts his coming to terms with second-generation survivor trauma and the role of music in helping to manage wounds that will never fully heal.
In the final moments of “Dedication,” Peltzman performs the music of Chopin, which his uncle Norbert Stern mastered as a teenager in Belgium. “I sense his presence. It brings my family to life. The Nazis didn’t succeed,” he has said.
Peltzman premiered his play at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2022. Earlier this year he toured with it in Berlin and Brussels. It will have its New York premiere at the United Nations on April 21, 2025, in commemoration of International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
This performance will also mark Merryall Center’s unveiling and dedication of its Stage Revitalization Project, funded by Connecticut’s Department of Community and Economic Development’s Good to Great Grant for Fiscal Year 2023.
New Milford Mayor Pete Bass will begin the evening with a proclamation written especially for the occasion.
Tickets are $30 in advance and $35 day-of-performance.
For more information about the play and to purchase tickets, visit www.merryallcenter.org.
Concert attendees are advised to be aware of the summer-long Merryall Road bridge closure. If traveling to the center at 8 Chapel Hill Road via West Meetinghouse Road, follow the detour signs to Tamarack Road which leads to Chapel Hill Road and Merryall Center.
